Two thousand deaths per year, half of them in people under 50.
In five years the number of cases of stomach cancer in Kenya has increased alarmingly. While there are in fact 2068 deaths, there are 2127 new cases every year.
This is revealed by a study conducted by Kenya since 2015 and presented by Dr Mohamed Maalim during a recent international conference on cancers in Kenya.
In the study presented in the years prior to the period under review, there were almost zero cases of cancer in young people,
According to the team of oncologists at Kenyatta National Hospital, the new trend is linked in particular to obesity, low-fibre diets and so-called 'junkie food' (fried, fast food and packaged foods) and lifestyles that have become more sedentary, especially for office workers and smart workers. 
Helicobapter Pylori infection has also been identified as one of the causes of this type of cancer.
It is also the aggressiveness of the disease on Kenyans, also because they are young, that worries experts. In 38% of patients, the tumours spread rapidly and widely to neighbouring organs.
In addition, patients under 40 years of age have a worse survival rate, in further contrast to the previous trend in which the elderly were the most affected.
According to Dr Maalim, most of these young patients are often misdiagnosed as having common digestive problems and that, by the time they are correctly diagnosed, the cancer has already metastasised to other organs.
"Third- and fourth-stage cancers amounted to more than 70% of the patients in the study," reads an extract from the report. The fact that most doctors do not consider controlling certain types of cancer in younger patients has been identified as a major weakness in the fight against the disease.
Stomach cancer has a 5-year survival rate of only 23%, which means that 77% of patients die within 5 years of diagnosis.
In general, the rapid increase in cancer cases in Kenya, not just stomach cancer, has recently prompted the Ministry of Health to launch prevention and service plans to better manage what by the numbers could be considered another new health emergency.